Pencil sharpening is a common interaction that many people perform everyday. While wooden pencils may be loosing popularity due to mechanical pencils, drawing pencils are usually still made of wood. As OCAD students, we use drawing pencils on a regular basis and we felt that this interaction was especially relevant to our audience.

The pencil sharpening process is very simple, as you can see from our flow chart. It was relatively easy to map out user patterns. We found three main patterns; users turn the pencil but not the sharpener, users turn the sharpener but not the pencil, and users turn both. The most common method was users turning both and the lease common method was users turning the pencil sharpener only.

For the most part we think the pencil sharpener does it’s job adequately. There are still room for improvements that would make it easier on the user. Our solution include making the sharpener transparent so users can see what is going on, keeping a round base and including two holes. We found that all our solutions existed already in pencil sharpeners, they just needed to be fused together to create the most efficient pencil sharpener.

– Students are spending many hours sitting during work
– The design of the chair affects students working
– Necessary to allow students in OCAD to work in comfort
– Main goal is to be able to work without having disturbance or being bothered: the chairs are designed to give comfort to students while working

Interaction

Interaction Analysis

Survey Questions
– Do you think that this chair is appropriate for computer use? In a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, what would you rate this chair?
– What types of adjustments do you make to the chair when you sit down?
– What types of problems have you had with this particular chair?
– How many hours per day do you usually sit in front of a computer at OCADU?
– How many hours per day can you tolerate sitting in this chair?

Overview of Problems: based on our survey, we came to a conclusion that students mainly had problems with the following:
– Seat is uncomfortable, too hard
– Backrest is too low
– Chair is small
– Missing armrest
– Wheels don’t roll well
– Chair breaks easily

Solutions:
Suggested design for new chairs with features including:
– comfortable to sit on during long working periods
– Seating surface that is easy to care
– Height adjustable for a comfortable sitting posture
– Stronger structure to prevent breaking easily
– Adjustable and lockable tilt function for increased stability and control in different sitting positions
– Built-in support; provides extra relief and support for your back
– Armrest

Observation

Interaction

Interaction Analysis

What problems occur during the interaction?
– Chopsticks don’t break evenly
– Lots of splinters – results in injuring the user. When user attempts to fix this problem, it causes more inconvenience or more injury.

hy do they occur?
– Low quality wood is used to produce the chopsticks.
– Misaligned grain can affect uneven breakage.
– Unfinished (laquer, polish, sanding) wood is more prone to splinters.
– Chopstick is not sanded to a design that is less likely to break unevenly.

good vs. bad quality

Is it related to the design of the chopsticks or to the user’s breaking methodology?
– Splinters may already exist due to bad manufacturing but more splinters can be created after breaking.
– Generally there is no wrong way to break chopsticks. The problems that occur in this interaction is rarely related to the user.

How do these problems affect the usability?
– Uneven breakage is a small inconvenience. In general, most people do not notice this problem and it does not prevent them from eating normally.
– Splinters cause discomfort and sometimes can injure the user while they are using the chopsticks or attempting to remove the splinters.

Solutions

Proposed solutions
•Due to the nature of these disposable chopsticks being as “cheap” as they are, we will keep the material as aspen wood.
•Dipped laqcuerfinishing can be an option and sanding to a better smooth finish can also decrease splintering problems
•Shaping of the chopstick is found to be a true solution to overall quality of chopstick.

Existing solutions
•The cylindrical tapered chopstick has been invented
•However it could include shorter length and better finishing